Experimental and kinetic study on the treatment of synthetic and real pharmaceutical wastewater by electrocoagulation

Department of Chemical Engineering, National Institute of Technology Calicut, Kozhikode-673 601, Kerala, India E-mail: haribhabu@nitc.ac.in Department of Chemical Engineering, Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering, Sriperambudur-602 117, Tamil Nadu, India Manuscript received online 06 December 2019, revised and accepted 23 December 2019 In this research, the probability of using the electrocoagulation process as a method of pharmaceutical removal from synthetic and real industry wastewater was demonstrated. Batch experiments were performed using a simple laboratory scale electrochemical reactor with aluminium as anode and stainless steel as cathode, respectively. The effects of main operating parameters such as current density, initial pH, electrolyte concentration and inter-electrode distance have been studied. Kinetic equilibrium stu-dies have shown that the pseudo-first order equation is better suited to the aluminum hydroxide adsorption process with a strong correlation between experimental and theoretical data. The findings showed that maximum removal of total organic carbon (TOC) (66%) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) (62.5%) was achieved for real industry wastewater